Dixie & the Dominion: Canada, the Confederacy, and the War for the Union

By Adam Mayers

Dixie & the Dominion is a compelling look at how the U.S. Civil War was a shared experience that shaped the futures of both Canada and the United States. The book focuses on the last year of the war, between April of 1864 and 1865. During that 12-month period, the Confederate States sent spies and saboteurs to Canada on a secret mission. These agents struck fear along the frontier and threatened to draw Canada and Great Britain into the war.

During that same time, Canadians were making their own important decisions. Chief among them was the partnership between Liberal reformer George Brown and Conservative chieftain John A. Macdonald. Their unlikely coalition was the force that would create the Dominion of Canada in 1867, and it was the pressure of the war - with its threat to the colonies’ security - that was a driving force behind this extraordinary pact.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Oct 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9781459712669

Adam Mayers

Adam Mayers is a senior editor at thestar.com, the Toronto Star's website, and a frequent contributor to Civil War Times Illustrated, the largest general interest magazine on the Civil War. His articles focus on Canadian connections to the conflict. Mr. Mayers has a degree in psychology from McMaster, a graduate degree in journalism from the City University of London, and an MBA from McMaster. He lives in Oakville, Ontario.

Book preview

Hughes

CHAPTER 1:

The Celebrated Stranger

May peace and prosperity be forever the blessing of Canada, for she has been the asylum of many of my friends, as she is now an asylum for myself . . . May God bless you all.

Jefferson Davis

The slap of the Champion’s paddle wheels was heard long before she was seen, though the steamer eventually slid out of the Lake Ontario fog at about 10:45 a.m. on May 30,1867. As she drew alongside Milloy’s Wharf in Toronto’s harbour, thousands of people — Southern exiles, the curious, and prominent local citizens alike — waited in anxious agitation.

The papers that day were full of the news that Queen Victoria had given royal assent to the British North America Act. It meant that on July 1 the clutch of five colonies that made up Britain’s possessions on the continent would be forged into a new nation called the Dominion of Canada. But the papers had been full of Confederation news for months. A far more spectacular, but unpublished, piece of news had brought a crowd of a thousand or more to the waterfront — a Confederate of a different sort. As the Champion drew alongside the wharf, the crowd watched for a glimpse of the celebrated stranger on board.

The rumour had spread through Toronto that Jefferson Davis, President of the late Confederate States of America, would be among the passengers. The papers had closely followed Davis’s release from prison a few days earlier and his journey by train through Washington to New York and from there Montreal, where his family had lived for the past two years. Now Davis was coming to Toronto on a mission he would later tell General Robert E. Lee probably saved his life.

Courtesy of Ontario Archives

Milloy’s Wharf at the foot of Toronto’s Yonge Street, where Jefferson Davis disembarked from the Champion in May 1867.

As the Champion hove to, her great paddle wheels fell silent and Davis appeared on deck. He walked slowly, with the help of a cane. His jacket and trousers were black and his coat collar was turned up against the chill. On one side stood the massive, athletic figure of James Mason, a one-time U.S. senator from Virginia and the late Confederacy’s ambassador to Great Britain. On the other stood Major Charles Helm, former Confederate consul in Havana.

For some, the sight of Davis’s frail and emaciated frame was a shock. Lieutenant-Colonel George T. Denison, a Canadian officer and Southern sympathizer, stared in disbelief at the change prison and defeat had wrought on Davis. I was so astonished that I said to a friend near me: ‘They have killed him,’ Denison wrote in his memoirs.¹

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Jefferson Davis told General Robert E. Lee that his trip to Canada in 1867 immediately after he was released from prison saved his life.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

James Mason, Confederate ambassador to England, lived in exile in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, after the Civil War.

Denison scrambled to the top of a pile of coal and began to cheer. The crowd took up his cry as Davis moved carefully down the wharf. Davis seemed stunned by the reception and paused to shake outstretched hands. The papers reported next day that clutching his hat and bowing repeatedly, Davis said again and again, Thank you, thank you, you are very kind to me.²

The press of people was so thick that police were forced to clear a way to a waiting carriage. From the wharf, it was a short ride to Helm’s home, where the party rested. About two hours later they boarded the Rothesay Castle and resumed their voyage to the small town of Niagara-on-the-Lake. As the party walked up the hill from the wharf, Davis turned and for a moment stared at Fort Niagara, New York, across the Niagara River, where an oversized Stars and Stripes fluttered in the evening breeze.

Look there Mason, he said, there is the grid iron we have been fried on.

After dinner, the local band came to the brick cottage where Mason lived. The band struck up Dixie and Davis came out onto the verandah. There was brief applause and then silence.

I thank you for the honor you have shown me, he said. May peace and prosperity be forever the blessing of Canada, for she has been the asylum of many of my friends, as she is now an asylum for myself . . . May God bless you all.³

It was a rousing start to an extraordinary five-month Canadian visit, a journey that allowed Davis to restore physical and mental equilibrium after four years of civil war and two more of prison. When Davis arrived in Canada his nerves were so frayed, ordinary sounds tormented him. The voices of people sounded like trumpets in his ears, his wife, Varina, later wrote in her memoirs.

In the United States, the railway coach Davis travelled in had been pelted with rotten fruit and crowds had jeered as he passed. In Canada, he was hailed as a tragic, even noble, fallen hero. Yet, on Davis’s orders in the spring of 1864, a team of guerrillas had used Canada as a base to launch raids against the Union. If these plans had succeeded, Canada would have been drawn into the war, a reluctant player in a larger Confederate game to gain peace at any price. Instead, the passage of three years had left Davis tormented by his failures and mourning his lost cause. These Canadians, these British Americans who greeted him with such affection, on the other hand, were making a peaceful and proud transition from colony to country.

Davis might well have wondered, that day, how different might things have been had the mission of Jacob Thompson, the man he’d sent to Canada in the last year of the war, succeeded.

CHAPTER 2

Spring Summons

I am on my way to Canada. It is a very difficult and delicate duty for which I am not suited by my talents, tastes or habits. I cannot enjoy secret service.

Clement Clay, April 1864

The Thistle was long, low, and very fast. She cast off from the Wilmington, North Carolina, wharf in the early afternoon of May 5 and steamed slowly out of sight. Her hull and deck were painted gray and she lay low in the water, heavy with baled cotton, barrels of turpentine, tobacco, rice, and sugar. These were the staples that the Confederate States traded for guns and manufactured goods in the marketplaces of Europe. Within a short time, the 201-foot blockade-runner seemed to disappear from sight, giving the illusion of invisibility.

In the late afternoon, the Thistle hove to eighteen miles down river in the shadow of Fort Fisher. The captain rowed ashore to confer with the Fort’s commandant, Colonel William Lamb. They agreed the Thistle would wait a day for a better chance of eluding the blockading Union cruisers lying offshore.

All that night and throughout the next day the Thistle waited patiently, until some thirty hours after leaving Wilmington, in the evening of May 6, she steamed into the confused waters where the mouth of the Cape Fear River meets the North Atlantic Ocean. She followed in the wake of the C.S.S. Raleigh, an ironclad Confederate naval ram, as the Raleigh snaked her way across the shallow Wilmington bar into the open sea. The Raleigh would act as a decoy, teasing, then eventually engaging, six of the blockading ships of the Union Navy to draw them away from the Thistle. Where the Raleigh headed south, the Thistle went north, running parallel to the shore for some time before turning eastward towards Bermuda. The island lay about 675 miles away, or about 72 hours of sailing time.

The Thistle’s passengers were sent below for safety and the captain offered his cabin to the two preferred guests on board. One was Jacob Thompson, a burly, bearded Mississippi planter. The other was Clement C. Clay, a smaller, wispier man who was a lawyer from Alabama. The men were offered the captain’s compliments and, if needed, brandy from his personal store.

The night was quite dark and very favourable for escape, Clay later wrote in his diary. We had not long crossed the bar when I saw the flash of a gun and after several minutes heard the report. I saw and heard the same six or seven times more, but whether proceeding from our guns or the enemies I could not tell.⁴

Clay believed the fire was aimed at the blockade-runner Young Republic, which had headed out a day earlier on a southerly course for Nassau. As it turned out, the guns were turned on the Raleigh, which for the rest of the night engaged two Union cruisers and then four more in the early hours of May 7. It was a spirited and courageous display by the Confederate ram, all the more remarkable for how little damage was done to any of the ships involved.⁵

The occasional muzzle flashes from the battle lit up the sky as the Thistle threaded her way through the blockading vessels. She came so close to her enemies that it seemed to Captain William Cleary, who was accompanying Thompson and Clay, as if he could reach out and touch the side of the ships as they passed.

We twisted our perilous way through the blockaders [and] could easily distinguish their towering hulks although they could not see us, Cleary later recalled. It seemed at times, as if a stone could have been pitched from our vessel into one of those dangerous neighbours.⁶

As dawn’s light broke, the Raleigh retreated toward the inlet and the protective umbrella of Fort Fisher’s guns. At about the same time, aboard the Thistle, Thompson, Clay, and Cleary woke from a light sleep. The Thistle had been spotted and a cruiser was giving chase.

In the rigging, a lookout kept his binoculars on the smoke in the distance. Although on paper the Thistle could do fourteen knots, that assumed ideal conditions, including an empty hold and calm seas. The lookout shouted to the captain that the cruiser was coming closer. If conditions held, the pursuing ship would be near enough to fire in a few hours. Reluctantly, the captain urged Thompson, Clay, and Cleary to prepare for their capture. This was pleasant intelligence for gentlemen going out on diplomatic business, Cleary wrote. I thought I might as well have remained and been shot the regular way on land.

The trio divided the twenty-five dollars in gold coins that they carried. Personal baggage was sorted and small valises packed with personal effects. I did not feel alarmed, yet not quite as easy as I desired, Clay wrote. Preparations were made for throwing over the cotton to save it from the Yankees. All our papers, tending to show our missions, were put in the bag with the government dispatches to be burned.⁷

Thompson and Clay assumed that upon capture they would soon be recognized. Both had been well-known in public life before the war. Between 1856 and 1860, Thompson had been Interior Secretary in the cabinet of President James Buchanan, the last administration before the outbreak of war. Clay had served his second term as a U.S. senator from Alabama during the same years. It would quickly be deduced that they were not common passengers, but agents in the service of their government.

Their orders had come directly from Confederate President Jefferson Davis a month earlier. On April 7, Davis sent a telegram to Thompson, summoning him to Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital. If your engagements will permit you to accept service abroad for six months, please come here immediately, Davis said.⁸

Within a few days Thompson arrived in a city that was still absorbing the shock of General Robert E. Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg nine months earlier. Richmond’s overflowing hospitals still held some of the twenty thousand men wounded during the three days of battle. Since then, the news seemed to have gone from bad to worse. Vicksburg and Port Hudson, the Confederate garrisons on the Mississippi, had fallen the same day that Lee began his retreat from Maryland. A gloom had settled over the Confederate States, and nowhere was it more visible than in Richmond.

John B. Jones, a clerk in the Confederate War Department, recorded in his diary that month: We are a shabby-looking people now, gaunt and many in rags.

In the spring of 1864, the outlook for the Confederacy was bleak. After three years of struggle the final grapple was at hand, and the South’s remarkable resiliency and extraordinary capacity to wage war would soon face a final test. Of the eleven states that had seceded with such high hopes in April 1861, only the six in the heartland remained intact, and they were threatened at almost every point. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman was about to begin his march through Georgia. In Virginia, General Ulysses S. Grant was pressing towards Richmond. Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas had been cut off by the fall of the Mississippi Valley forts. In the north, Kentucky and Tennessee were largely in Union hands. The South’s ability to carry the war into the North had ended with Lee’s withdrawal after Gettysburg.

Abraham Lincoln’s war policy had also become clear by early 1864. The North had more men, more factories, and more guns, and Lincoln would bring all these resources to bear in a total war. He would grind the Confederate spirit and break their will to fight. Union armies were to use all means to deny the Confederacy resources to wage war by razing their cities, destroying their factories and railroads, burning their crops, and laying waste to their farms.

The South had given up believing that Britain and France would give it diplomatic recognition. This status would have enabled it to break the tightening Union blockade because more ships would use its ports, making it harder for the Union to enforce the blockade. More ships meant more vital goods coming in and more cotton out. Official recognition would also have the intangible effect of shoring up Southern spirits as much as it would be a blow to Northern morale.

Early in the war, the Confederacy had misplayed its diplomatic cards, hoping to bully Great Britain into support by withholding cotton exports. But King Cotton diplomacy hadn’t worked. Britain, at the height of its Imperial power, had no intention of being held hostage to warring parties in its former colony. Instead Britain chose neutrality, supporting neither North nor South and trading with both. Of necessity it found new sources of cotton in Egypt and India, and the South resumed exports.

Any hope for a diplomatic victory seemed to rest on the presidential elections in the North. In November, Abraham Lincoln had to stand for re-election. As in the South, weariness had settled over the North. Many Northerners saw Lincoln’s great weakness as his conduct of the war. The critics’ voices had grown louder, saying the price of victory was too high and perhaps even unachievable.

Just weeks after the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Lincoln sought to press his advantage by calling for the draft of five hundred thousand more men. When New York papers published the news, it triggered three days of rioting in the city that saw government buildings, black-owned businesses, and churches ransacked and burned. Almost one thousand people were killed or injured. It took thousands of troops to quell the unrest. If the South could help that resentment spread, who knew what might be achieved?

Stories had reached Richmond for almost a year, telling of how large parts of the so-called Northwest — today’s American Midwest of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan — were desperate for peace at any price. The war was killing their men and destroying their commerce. Traditional trade and transportation routes along the Mississippi for corn, cattle, and lumber were closed. It was causing ruin everywhere along the upper reaches of the river. Fathers and brothers were being drafted to fight and die for a cause with which they had little connection. They neither owned slaves nor found common cause in trying to free them.

It was also said that secret societies had sprung up in the Midwest and armies numbering in the thousands were ready to rise up in rebellion. Davis hoped to encourage such seditious acts and couldn’t think of a better place to do it than from bases in British Canada. The Canadian colony’s long, virtually undefended border with the Northern states was ideal for infiltration. Southern agents could move freely and many Canadians had pro-Southern sympathies.

Davis had first turned to Alexander H. Stuart, a former U.S Secretary of the Treasury, who was invited to Richmond to discuss a matter too delicate for correspondence.⁹

Davis flattered Stuart, telling him he would have a sort of diplomatic family . . . the mission of which was to foster and give aid to the peace sentiment then active among the border states, Stuart later recalled. His mission would be well financed and he was to have free hand in spending the money. Stuart believed success hinged on a remarkable delusion about the extent of the Northern peace movement and how the Confederacy might capitalize on it. He declined on the grounds of pressing family obligations.

Within a week Davis had settled on Thompson. The men had known each other for almost half a century. Both lived in Mississippi, and their paths had crossed many times in the course of long political careers. Thompson had been a tireless worker for the Democratic Party. In 1856, when Thompson lost the Mississippi senate race to Davis, the party rewarded his loyalty with the cabinet post in Buchanan’s administration.

Thompson was a bookish, keenly intelligent man who spoke French and Italian fluently and was obsessed with education. He was one of the founding fathers of the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He also started Oxford’s first female academy. He was instrumental in founding the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, after the Civil War, giving freely of his money and time. Before the war, when his extended family ran into financial trouble, Thompson paid for nieces and nephews to attend colleges in Boston and Baltimore. He was always reading, always learning, and deeply religious, a puritan with all its nineteenth-century connotations.

But if friends and family saw him as generous and supportive, others described him as humourless or as someone who could be vindictive and cruel. He also had an awkward personality that made him seem taciturn and sour at times. Captain Thomas Hines, Thompson’s military commander in Canada, would describe him as a man of sterling integrity, undoubted ability, and great political experience. But he was unluckily inclined to believe much that was told him, trust too many men, doubt too little and suspect less. Hines’s friend Captain John Castleman noted more gently that while Thompson was always a gentleman, he was no diplomat and was unable to realize that many men were not as honorable as he.¹⁰

Thompson, fifty-four, had other assets. He was well connected in the North from his days in Washington and had the stature of a prewar national politician. From a Canadian base he could quietly seek out old friends and those who would embrace anything that furthered the Confederate goal of peace. Thompson had some military experience, having served as Inspector General with General John Pemberton in the Western Theatre, seeing action at the Battle of Shiloh and Vicksburg in 1862–63. Now he was at loose ends in Mississippi, tending to his business affairs in Oxford and dabbling in the politics of the state legislature. He could be convincing and he was certainly resourceful and shrewd. Although there would be many criticisms of Thompson’s behavior, one consistent measure of the man was loyalty. He stood by his cause, his family, and his friends long after it might have been prudent or practical. He also held a fundamental belief in the power of positive thinking and, like all optimists, thought anything possible as long as one had conviction.

Thompson was elected to Congress in 1839, a position that he held for a remarkable six consecutive terms. He wasn’t known for his public speaking, but he often seemed to best his opponent with sound argument. He worked hard for the Democratic Party and in 1852 declined the prestigious post of U.S. Consul to Cuba. The following year he lost the Mississippi senatorial race to Jefferson Davis, but his devotion to the party was rewarded in 1856 by being appointed Secretary of the Interior in the newly elected Buchanan administration.

Thompson was a hardline secessionist by 1860 and threatened to resign his cabinet post if Buchanan sent a troop ship, the Star of the West, to relieve the besieged federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston’s harbour. When Buchanan did this, Thompson resigned on January 9, 1861, and returned home. He took no part in the formation of the Confederate government, but when General P.G.T. Beauregard was sent to command the Confederacy’s Army of the West, Thompson offered his services as an aide.

He fought in the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee in the spring of 1862 and had a horse shot out from under him, although he was unhurt. In mid-1862, when General John Pemberton took over as Commander in the West, he joined Pemberton’s staff as Inspector General. He fought with Pemberton at the siege of Vicksburg, and when Vicksburg fell he returned to Oxford, where he took a seat in the state legislature. That was where President Davis found him